EcoWorldly

Move over Hubble Telescope, the European Space Agency has launched the largest telescope ever sent to space on a mission to study how the Big Bang created the universe. This comes right on the heels of another related and exciting scientific breakthrough: for the first time ever, scientists have successfully showed us how the earliest building blocks for life on the planet probably formed from scratch. Are we on the brink of a more complete understanding of our planet’s evolution?

Details you say? Here they are. The European Space Agency’s plan to study the Big Bang comes at a cost of $952 million. Yesterday a rocket launched from the South American country of French Guiana sent the telescope as well as a spacecraft above our atmosphere, and they both could very well soon be household names.

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The Associated Press reports that the large Herschel Telescope will collect data about how stars and galaxies form, by analyzing materials such as ice chunks and debris left over from the formation of planets. Meanwhile, a second spacecraft known as the Planck will collect information about radiation that remains from the big bang explosion.

While it’s probably best to remain skeptical that we will definitely find the answers we seek in space, new research indicates that we are actually beginning to understand the origins of life quite well here on earth. In a study that was published on Wednesday in the prestigious journal Nature, scientists write about how they successfully formed what they think is one of the most primeval materials that created life: RNA. You might remember it from biology class as one of the precursor elements to DNA, life’s genetic material. An article in Wired provides a summary:

A fundamental but elusive step in the early evolution of life on Earth has been replicated in a laboratory. Researchers synthesized the basic ingredients of RNA, a molecule from which the simplest self-replicating structures are made. Until now, they couldn’t explain how these ingredients might have formed…RNA is now found in living cells, where it carries information between genes and protein-manufacturing cellular components. Scientists think RNA existed early in Earth’s history, providing a necessary intermediate platform between pre-biotic chemicals and DNA, its double-stranded, more-stable descendant.

So what should we make of all this?

I don’t know.

But it seems that to better understand the ecosystems of the world, ourselves, and every organism there is– it would helpful to know just how we got here and started evolving. Scientific developments such as these are exciting and terrific food for thought.

Photo Credits: © ESA

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